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[Bauglir]

Heh, I was reading SalmonGod's post and kept thinking, "Yes! This! So much!" And then there was the edit. But yes, this perspective shapes how I think and has been a powerful tool for understanding virtually everything I've learned about biology over the past few years - even though it's just a vague philosophical musing that doesn't produce testable results, it's still proved extremely useful to me. Besides being practical in that way, it also inspires a greater degree of awe than any religion I've ever experienced so far, although that's a scarce number.

The concept of a "chair" does not have physical meaning, as far as I'm aware - what a chair is is a particular pattern, information. But it has meaning, and not in the purely abstract sense of the word (which is something concepts like "freedom" or "happiness" seem to have). The distinction I make in the second sentence is a thought I literally just had, though, so I'm going to need to think on that for a while to see if it really means anything or if it just sounds like it.

EDIT: Oh, fuck, I'm Plato now, aren't I? Something something ideal forms something something. Well, on looking it up, not exactly - I don't ascribe them quite the same level of significance or anything like that, but maybe a similar principle.

[MaximumZero]

I'm no expert, but Plato's "Forms" had more to do with thought and imagination being pure and perfect than anything else. (If I'm wrong, and I probably am, I blame my crackpot philosophy teacher for not actually teaching us anything.) Yes, we can conceive of the perfect chair, but the word "chair" has no utility in and of itself. Even if we called it something else, what's to stop it from being the same thing? Is there a perfect fnurgle? To someone, I'm sure there is. On top of that, everyone's definition of the perfect chair is different, so there is no such thing as the perfect chair for everyone.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, further research (*cough*wikipedia) suggests that there's more difference than I initially thought. Phew. I share the thought that a chair is purely the qualities of chairness, but everything following that seems to be quite different.

[Descan]

I'm going to bed.

Before I go, I'm just going to say everything is subjective, but you can get semi-objectivity if you define what your goals are when you say something is the "best" at a thing.

Now, what those goals are is also subjective, so it's really a house of cards. But then again, so is everything.

This message brought to you by the phrase, "Sleep Deprivation."

[kaijyuu]

Oh dear, metaphysics now. I'll just pop in to say metaphysics is nuts and if you wanna go down that discussion path you'll end up saying and believing some weird things.

Not that there's anything wrong with metaphysics, it's just that it's... a bit crazy when you really dive into it.

[SalmonGod]

I'm less interested in the relationship between linguistic conceptions and objects than I am in the nature of our perception of reality.  We recognize a chair as isolated from the material surrounding it because there are differences in the patterns of particles, as you mentioned, but what other types of boundaries could we become aware of if we altered the nature of our consciousness a bit?  As demonstrated in the TED talk, our perception of boundaries between different types of matter composing objects seems to be a feature of our specific mental processes, and highly subjective in nature.  And what if we were capable of perceiving things on a different scale?  Shrink down a pair of human eyes and put them on a microscopic organism or blow them up and put them on a galaxy.  Completely different things appear to be isolated objects.  I've often heard people talk about god looking at us like an ant farm.  I imagine he'd look at us more like subatomic particles.

And shift that same line of thought slightly to the nature of our consciousness.  From a purely material perspective, we see it as something generated by our brain... but the processes in our brain can be directly compared to processes we participate in.  It seems to me like consciousness shouldn't have the limitations that we take for granted in order to define our existence as individuals, but that we could be part of greater consciousness that we simply cannot conceive of because we are but one part of a whole that from our point of perspective is incredibly abstract.

[Vector]

The Platonic form idea is that there's this idea, chair, which we understand, and from which all experiences of chairs partake, even if the chairs are different in shape, feel, etc., whatever.

Kind of like Truth or Law.

[Bauglir]

I generally agree with this, SalmonGod. I was using a chair as an arbitrary example of something perceived, and I just needed some way of conveying what I meant in a way that meant anything at all. The linguistic aspect of it is definitely interesting, but not what I was trying to get at there.

Anyway, I will say that I don't trouble too much about higher levels of consciousness of which I'm a component since, by definition, I'd never be able to be cognizant of them. It's interesting to try to think about, certainly, and it might be interesting in some kind of hyperfuture to try and map out the equivalent of neural pathways, but I think that even success there would tell you about as much about what this hypothetical overmind is thinking as mapping scent pathways in a human brain tells you about what that person thinks apple pie smells like[/old example].

The Platonic form idea is that there's this idea, chair, which we understand, and from which all experiences of chairs partake, even if the chairs are different in shape, feel, etc., whatever.

Kind of like Truth or Law.

Yeah, I shouldn't have even brought it up, it wasn't really relevant.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, I don't get worked up about it, either.  It's just the type of stuff I've daydreamed about for fun since I was a kid.  I used to do things like catch a bug and watch it crawl up my arm, and wonder at how that bug perceives me.  Though as I get older, I daydream more about social issues and memetics and stuff.

Anyway, it was all just a big overly elaborate comment on the whole science vs religion thing.

[Vector]

Haha, I've thought about those things a lot, too, ever since I read A Wind in the Door.

[Bauglir]

Okay, fine, I'm going to actually write up a proper list of books I need to read instead of just saying I'll add books to it, because I forget within a week. Not this time!

[Vector]

What, you haven't read that series?!  Go!  Now!  Posthaste!  It'll only take you an afternoon or two!

[SalmonGod]

I need to read it, too.  I read A Wrinkle in Time in 6th grade, and remember loving it, but I don't remember nearly enough about it now to judge how I'd relate to it as an adult.  I didn't even know there was a series.

[Bauglir]

I never read that, either, or most things I've later found I should have. My childhood was spent in a sea of Michael Crichton and Star Wars novels. Thrawn was the best, and now we are talking about reading habits in this thread and I can't help but wonder where things are going to go next. I can guarantee that at least one person is going to be irritated by the glorious, beautiful derail.

[Solifuge]

I ought to re-read the series as well... I was old enough for it to make a difference in my life (4th grade, was it?), but I've forgotten the better part of it. It's been assimilated into my mind and personality, and led me down some interesting trains of thought since then, but it's something I can only remember vaguely now.